Currently for big brands only
Importance:
Recommended link: Google employee announcement
Google Plus has announced via the G+ page of employee Saurabh Sharma that brands can now use specific URLs to promote their Google+ brand or company page via offline media. About time too! Although to be fair, it took Facebook and LinkedIn a while after launch to offer this for company or brand pages. It was certainly clunky before.
The vanity URL uses a “+” (what else?). For example, Toyota can now use this URL…
http://plus.google.com/+toyota
(which redirects to http://plus.google.com/+toyota/posts)
rather than…
https://plus.google.com/110937137992985950150
You can find out more details about this update via the post on Saurabh Sharma’s profile:
Marketing implications of this change for company Google+ pages?
Most companies will have to wait until Google announces further details to make this an option for everyone – we’ll alert you. Looking at the http headers for the above with an HTTP header viewer, Google is naturally using a 301 redirect which is likely to have to be manually setup for their large clients.
However, if you’re a large brand with a large investment in Adwords it’s worth contacting your Google Account manager to set this up.
If you don’t want to wait you can make use of a service like Gplus (http://gplus.to/) to setup vanity URLs.
